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Urinary tract infections (UTIs), especially a type called cystitis, are incredibly common. In fact, about half of all women will experience a UTI at some point in their lives, and many deal with repeated infections.
These infections are painful, can lead to serious complications if left untreated, and present a growing challenge for doctors — mostly due to the rise in antibiotic resistance.
When a patient shows signs of a UTI, doctors often prescribe antibiotics right away. But here’s the problem: it can take several days using standard tests to identify exactly which bacteria are causing the infection. In the meantime, the antibiotic may or may not be the right one. This uncertainty can lead to treatment failure and worsens the global issue of antibiotic resistance.
Now, scientists at ETH Zurich, in collaboration with Balgrist University Hospital, have created a fast and promising new test that could change how UTIs are diagnosed and treated. Their work, recently published in Nature Communications, uses something called bacteriophages — viruses that naturally attack bacteria.
Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are extremely specific. Each type only targets certain bacteria. The research team, led by Professor Martin Loessner, identified phages that can attack the three main bacteria behind most UTIs: Escherichia coli (E. coli), Klebsiella, and Enterococci.
But they didn’t stop there. The scientists genetically modified the phages to make them even better at their job. When these altered phages infect harmful bacteria in a urine sample, they make the bacteria produce a light signal.
This signal is easy to detect, which means doctors could find out — in less than four hours — exactly which bacteria are causing the infection. That’s a huge improvement over current tests that can take several days.
With this quick result, doctors can immediately prescribe the right antibiotic. This means better care for the patient and a reduced chance of using the wrong drug, which helps in the global fight against antibiotic resistance.
But the researchers went even further. They also used these phages as part of a possible treatment. Although phage therapy has been around for over a century, it was mostly forgotten in Western countries after antibiotics like penicillin became widely available. But with antibiotic resistance becoming a major problem, scientists are giving phage therapy a second look.
What’s special about these new phages is that they were engineered to be even more powerful. Once inside the harmful bacteria, they not only produce more phages but also release special proteins called bacteriocins that help kill the bacteria from within. This “double attack” approach could make the treatment much more effective.
The next step is to test this therapy in real patients. ETH Zurich and Balgrist University Hospital are preparing clinical trials to study how well it works in people.
One of the lead authors of the study, Matthew Dunne, says this is just the beginning. Many research groups and companies around the world are also exploring how phages — both natural and genetically modified — could be used in medicine.
However, for this kind of treatment to become common in hospitals, more clinical trials and regulatory changes are needed. Since phages are living things that can evolve, current drug regulations will need to adapt too.
This exciting new development could mean faster, more accurate UTI diagnosis and better treatments that don’t rely so heavily on antibiotics. If successful, it may lead to a new era in how we fight bacterial infections — not just in UTIs, but possibly in many other infections where antibiotics are struggling to keep up.
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